Benevolent GM stance

[Ruin Explorer]

That's a pretty broad statement. Both myself and at least one other person gave examples of why we do this and how we avoid your accusation. You may not believe us and stand firm in your conviction but that doesn't make it so.

I do agree that if you're just playing a "fill in" support character, so long as they have a personality which means they're a follower not a leader, and they don't have a paternalistic or patron-like relationship with the group, and generally aren't making stuff "about them", then that's not usually a big problem or a GMPC in a normal sense, rather they're a helpful NPC.

But I would strongly question why you're playing them at all. Why not hand them over to the players? If they're refusing, but still want a healer or w/e and the system requires one (5E does not, of course), then I can see playing them in a very minimal sort of way. But if you never even asked... well, that's not a good look.

I would argue that these kind of characters are potentially the road to hell, and it's absolutely paved with good intentions. You have to be really careful with how you design them, and how you play them, and again, to justify you playing them not the other players, I think that requires a very specific situation if they're an active, continuous party member.

The only reasons i see to use the term “GMPC” over “NPC” are bad ones

Well yes. Generally GMPC describes an NPC who has become a problem because the DM/GM is insisting on playing them like they were a full member of the party and maybe even started taking the lead and/or giving orders to the other PCs with them, and is probably thinking about centering the story of the campaign on them.

Unfortunately this is a very common pattern, and a lot of GMs seem to think it's fine if they "just play a character", and then fine if that character is more powerful than the PCs (because they know the limits of what's okay, they're more sensible than the silly players), and it's fine if that character is in telling the party what to do (after all, the other PCs could do that), and it's fine if the story of the campaign centers around that GMPC, and so on.

I'd go as far as to note there's actually an official 5E WotC campaign that basically makes this mistake (I leave identifying this campaign as an exercise to the reader).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Could we please try to not derail this conversation into one about GMPC. That topic was attempted excluded in my initial post. GMPC as @Ruin Explorer is describing is a phenomenom that is well known, and the center of many #rpghorrorstories. Ruin explorer is also recognising in their post that there are of course going to exist NPC that is friendly. I have failed to provide an explenation that Ruin Explorer has accepted and understood of what I try to convey.

Sure, but helpful NPCs are nothing special as we both agree, and I don't think there's any GM stance where you don't see helpful NPCs - not even hard adversarial DMing - even then there will be helpful NPCs in practice.

 

[Hex08]

The only reasons i see to use the term “GMPC” over “NPC” are bad ones

That's not a very helpful response. So if an NPC run by the GM adventures with the party from start to finish (or a significant part of the adventure) are they an NPC or a GMPC? Maybe I just don't see the difference others do, to me any character not run by a player is an NPC and is consequently run by the GM but until this thread I never even considered the term GMPC but I would only use it if the NPC adventures with the party for a reasonable amount of time. Maybe there is a semantic difference but this thread seems to be bogged down with them.

 

[Hex08]

Could we please try to not derail this conversation into one about GMPC. That topic was attempted excluded in my initial post. GMPC as @Ruin Explorer is describing is a phenomenom that is well known, and the center of many #rpghorrorstories. Ruin explorer is also recognising in their post that there are of course going to exist NPC that is friendly. I have failed to provide an explenation that Ruin Explorer has accepted and understood of what I try to convey.

A reasonable ask so I will back off. @Ruin Explorer also reasonably answered me although points were raised I would otherwise dispute or clarify but will not do so to respect your request.

 

[CleverNickName]

For me, it looks like this.

In the first adventure of the last campaign I ran, we had a whole party of Humans and Goliaths and Firbolgs...and nobody noticed during Session Zero that none of them had darkvision.

So they entered the dungeon, accidentally fell down a chute, and were dropped into an underground cave system. When I asked who was carrying the light source, everyone froze. Only one character had torches, and only by accident--they were included in his Explorer's Pack. Nobody had thought to bring any lanterns, nobody had a Light cantrip...they only had enough light for a few hours, and then they would be stumbling around blind until they found the exit.

Well, that didn't sound like fun to anyone. So before they ran out of torches, I replaced some Giant Rats with Giant Fire Beetles instead. They were able to defeat them handily, and they collected more than enough glowing glands to last the rest of the adventure. They found the exit, made it back to town, geared up properly.

 

[Koloth]

I think being an effective benevolent GM requires a good ability to compartmentalize what the Benevolent NPC knows from what the GM knows. This allows the BNPC to give advice to the party without spilling the whole plot secret. Even possible that advice is a well meaning but wrong bit of advice. If you as GM can't separate NPC knowledge from GM knowledge, stick with adversarial NPC. A lot easier to run when the NPC's objective is some variation of "Kill the Party".

As for risk of TPK, cover that in session 0. Especially if there are players you haven't GM'ed before. Fair number of players have only ran in adventure paths where the encounters all end with a version of "after the PCs finish the encounter....". Death really wasn't on the table.

If the party or a character, is trying to retreat, let them even if you have to bend the rules a bit. I think too many rules writers are also from the PC's don't die adventure path group so the need for a successful retreat isn't a common thought. You can extract a price. "To get away, you have to lighten your load until you can run at full speed..." or "Maybe dropping all your money pouches...".

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Well, that didn't sound like fun to anyone. So before they ran out of torches, I replaced some Giant Rats with Giant Fire Beetles instead. They were able to defeat them handily, and they collected more than enough glowing glands to last the rest of the adventure. They found the exit, made it back to town, geared up properly.

Ahhh the old EverQuest approach!

 

[Enrahim]

Sure, but helpful NPCs are nothing special as we both agree, and I don't think there's any GM stance where you don't see helpful NPCs - not even hard adversarial DMing - even then there will be helpful NPCs in practice.

Ah that might be the crux! The idea behind the choice of word "stance" is that this is something that is changing from moment to moment during play. I thought this would be clear from my initial examples. Play is not a continous tactical fight. And even within a fight I have described how I could change "stance" from adversarial (playing the monsters as tactically effective as I can) to benevolent (frantically searching for reasonable ways to get the PCs out of a clearly lost fight).

I hope this could help you understand how I am talking about something completely different from the standard "GM style" which is something that is continous. From what you say here it appear you encåvisioned my "stance" to also be something stable and continous?

 

[Reynard]

So they entered the dungeon, accidentally fell down a chute, and were dropped into an underground cave system. When I asked who was carrying the light source, everyone froze. Only one character had torches, and only by accident--they were included in his Explorer's Pack. Nobody had thought to bring any lanterns, nobody had a Light cantrip...they only had enough light for a few hours, and then they would be stumbling around blind until they found the exit.

Character sheets are letters to the GM. if none of them had darkvision or light sources, they were telling you that they did not care about, or actively disliked, dark dungeons and/or light resource management.

 

[CleverNickName]

Character sheets are letters to the GM. if none of them had darkvision or light sources, they were telling you that they did not care about, or actively disliked, dark dungeons and/or light resource management.

Nah, we've been gaming together for 14 years, I have a pretty good handle on what they care about and what they like. They just each assumed that someone else would have a lantern or light cantrip.